You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
As a Gen Xer I've been regaled with tales of those early PC days when the prehistoric hackers worked from garages and slept under the VW buses together, and I think Cory Doctorow has as well. In Makers he takes the same idea of the passionate artists and technology hackers pushing the boundaries with new technologies and places them in the near future - the twenty-teens. In this brave new world he explores the implications of junk yards full of hardware and kitsch mass-marketed detritus, obesity, 3-D printers, American shanty towns, and the overall decline of America with cultural pockets in Boston, Miami, Silicon Valley, and Madison Wisconsin. Unlike many SF novels of declining societies, this one is infused with optimism and reflects the ability of most hackers to focus on their inner life and to ignore or edit out the suboptimal parts of their surroundings that bother most people.
Doctorow puts together a wonderful cast of characters. Suzanne Church is the tech reporter turned wealthy blogger documenting the work of Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, "trash-hackers" who start their career by creating products out of technological trash and then move to crowd-sourced rides that compete with Disney. Their 3-D printer escapades are the ultimate "stick it to the man." Doctorow is thought provoking and thoughtful in how he sees our interaction with technology playing out in the next 10 years. I thoroughly enjoyed it though I do wish he could write as well as William Gibson. He seems to find words and crafting of sentences as a necessary evil to getting across the world and stories he creates.
Full disclosure - I own a 3-D printer that Doctorow fantasizes about in this novel, so my fascination and positive review of this book may be verging on narcissism!
Doctorow puts together a wonderful cast of characters. Suzanne Church is the tech reporter turned wealthy blogger documenting the work of Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, "trash-hackers" who start their career by creating products out of technological trash and then move to crowd-sourced rides that compete with Disney. Their 3-D printer escapades are the ultimate "stick it to the man." Doctorow is thought provoking and thoughtful in how he sees our interaction with technology playing out in the next 10 years. I thoroughly enjoyed it though I do wish he could write as well as William Gibson. He seems to find words and crafting of sentences as a necessary evil to getting across the world and stories he creates.
Full disclosure - I own a 3-D printer that Doctorow fantasizes about in this novel, so my fascination and positive review of this book may be verging on narcissism!
The book was interesting, but I felt it didn't have as tight a plot as the other novels and short stories I'd read. Based on my recent conversations with Dan, it'd be right up his alley as he likes books that don't have a plot, just describe the lives of the characters. Not that there isn't a consistent theme throughout the book, I just felt like it never had a true climax.
Book contains some of Doctorow's favorite things: The idea of belonging to tribes, Disney, and emergent behavior.
Book contains some of Doctorow's favorite things: The idea of belonging to tribes, Disney, and emergent behavior.
Cory Doctorow is a writer who has some wonderful ideas ([b:Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom|29587|Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom|Cory Doctorow|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168033624s/29587.jpg|1413]) and a solid technical grounding to support many of his stories ([b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother|Cory Doctorow|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255817214s/954674.jpg|939584]). But sometimes, as in this book, he meanders. Plot threads are introduced that don't actually advance the story. Characters go from villains to mostly-nice guys at whiplash speeds. There's a single, graphic sex scene that (in its solitariness) seems gratuitous or as if Doctorow was challenging himself to see if he could write credible erotica.
Most troubling for me was the cloying arrogance Doctorow was displaying towards people. Even background characters are noted to be fat, acned, smelly, dull, lacking fashion sense, etc. I came away thinking far less of Doctorow as a person than I did of the kinds of people he was skewering.
In any event, I found myself just wanting the story to move along faster and get to a point. Good thing he added the Epilogue, which ends the book on a very human, very bittersweet note.
This book is overall a great read, fun and fascinating. Of its three parts, I liked the first part best -- the other two dragged a little in comparison.
At some level this really resonated with me and on a few occasions I've heard someone say something and also related the storyline as fact - which I guess shows that I engaged with it. I found the storyline drifted a bit, and that I lost interest in the characters about two thirds in. A fun read.
Weirdly slow-paced, and unnecessarily (?) long. I say "slow-paced" and mean that it felt like - I was following a bunch of blog posts. Or real-life news. As in, this book is written (somehow) in a way that feels too... real? mundane? to keep my interest and excitement.
That being said - this is a fun concept, with fun characters, and a solid plot. And I really appreciated the bit at the end of the ebook where Doctorow explained his philosophy around the absurdity of ebook publishing ("my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity") and sharing his work, which left me with a significantly warmer view of him as a person and author, if not as an author whose works I'd like to continue consuming avidly. Alas.
(Also, the fact that this book took me a month to finish should be a sign unto itself. Grab me! Grip me! Prevent me from doing anything else besides finishing your book!)
That being said - this is a fun concept, with fun characters, and a solid plot. And I really appreciated the bit at the end of the ebook where Doctorow explained his philosophy around the absurdity of ebook publishing ("my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity") and sharing his work, which left me with a significantly warmer view of him as a person and author, if not as an author whose works I'd like to continue consuming avidly. Alas.
(Also, the fact that this book took me a month to finish should be a sign unto itself. Grab me! Grip me! Prevent me from doing anything else besides finishing your book!)
I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow for his activism, though this is the first book of his that I've read, and just found it OK. A mere 2/5. It's entertaining enough and contemporary, but it simply didn't captivate me.
Started out good, then revealed itself to be tedious, sprawling, and far too obvious in its proselytising. Unfinishable.
While authors tend not to have a lot of control and say over the images and colors that will grace their books, the publisher must put a lot of work into deciding what the cover of a particular book should be. The cover for Makers does a great job of hinting and implying at the events taking place within its pages: a stacked wall of old, abandoned keyboards, with hanging connector cords; occasional mouses squeezed in here and there, cables also dangling. The keyboards and mouses reveal the subject matter of technological devices that soon become outdated and almost forgotten, as a newer, flashier item replaces it, while technology updates and improves. The key term is obsolete.
It is our near future, between ten and thirty years down the line, as events progress in the book. Percy Gibbons and Lester Banks are makers: they like to make something out of nothing. Specifically they’re interested in inventing new and useful pieces of technology using defunct and obsolete parts, thereby not needing any new, hard to get materials. They soon become employees of a new company – Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) – as they begin coming up with great and crazy new inventions with a steady paycheck. Journalist Suzanne Church begins to cover their work for the publication she works for, and then starts her own blog covering the rise of Kodacell in popularity and insight with its products, and soon becomes a celebrity in her own right.
But all things must come to an end, like the end of the Dot Com revolution. Time passes, things change, while Gibbons and Banks move onto their next project: an automated theme park of robots that create displays and showcases on the history of technology and its change over time. Viewers, in their own little car, get to choose whether they like a particular display or not, thereby making the robots alter, reconfigure and improve it overnight for the viewing customer. It is a constantly changing and self-replicating enterprise; much better than Disney World which is quite different from today’s park.
Makers is not a chronological book with beginning, middle, and end, but more of a long snapshot into a world that could very well become our own. Doctorow is asking many questions and making many comments on society and where it might be going, addressing subjects like the giants of Wal-Mart and Disney World, as well as the obesity problem with a new and terrifying procedure. Makers works on many levels, not just analyzing technology, but from a business standpoint, as well as a human one where many lives can be affected. It is a novel with a story that shouldn’t be taken as a steadfast message of “this is our future,” but more “this is something that could happen,” and what are your thoughts on it? Or perhaps even: “What are you going to do about it?”
For more book reviews and exclusive author interviews, go to BookBanter.
It is our near future, between ten and thirty years down the line, as events progress in the book. Percy Gibbons and Lester Banks are makers: they like to make something out of nothing. Specifically they’re interested in inventing new and useful pieces of technology using defunct and obsolete parts, thereby not needing any new, hard to get materials. They soon become employees of a new company – Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) – as they begin coming up with great and crazy new inventions with a steady paycheck. Journalist Suzanne Church begins to cover their work for the publication she works for, and then starts her own blog covering the rise of Kodacell in popularity and insight with its products, and soon becomes a celebrity in her own right.
But all things must come to an end, like the end of the Dot Com revolution. Time passes, things change, while Gibbons and Banks move onto their next project: an automated theme park of robots that create displays and showcases on the history of technology and its change over time. Viewers, in their own little car, get to choose whether they like a particular display or not, thereby making the robots alter, reconfigure and improve it overnight for the viewing customer. It is a constantly changing and self-replicating enterprise; much better than Disney World which is quite different from today’s park.
Makers is not a chronological book with beginning, middle, and end, but more of a long snapshot into a world that could very well become our own. Doctorow is asking many questions and making many comments on society and where it might be going, addressing subjects like the giants of Wal-Mart and Disney World, as well as the obesity problem with a new and terrifying procedure. Makers works on many levels, not just analyzing technology, but from a business standpoint, as well as a human one where many lives can be affected. It is a novel with a story that shouldn’t be taken as a steadfast message of “this is our future,” but more “this is something that could happen,” and what are your thoughts on it? Or perhaps even: “What are you going to do about it?”
For more book reviews and exclusive author interviews, go to BookBanter.
At some level this really resonated with me and on a few occasions I've heard someone say something and also related the storyline as fact - which I guess shows that I engaged with it. I found the storyline drifted a bit, and that I lost interest in the characters about two thirds in. A fun read.